How Where You Are Impacts Learning

Location Effects on Learning and Recall

Recent research has shown that the brain, or specifically the hippocampus switches between learning and remembering depending on location. That raises some important points for learning scenarios and how to prime our brain for learning – our environment therefore plays a larger role than we may think.

Mouse sitting on a treadmill in front of virtual reality. Image credit: Lukas Fischer (CC BY 4.0).

https://elifesciences.org/digests/51458/virtual-reality-for-mice

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Recently I posted a Research Hit on the brain about switching between learning and memory. It was insightful insomuch that I hadn’t really considered the distinction - but it is an important distinction and one that we likely massively underestimate in learning processes.

Let’s review that Research Hit: Gomez-Ocadiz et al. conducted study in mice that aimed to explore the differences between learning and recall. This is difficult to separate in the real world because we are constantly doing both: encountering familiar situations and stimuli and also novel situations and stimuli. So, to do this they put mice into a virtual reality simulator. Yes, it might sound weird, or cute, that these mice used micro virtual reality goggles - and testament to the ingenuity of researchers!

This, however, gave them the ability to put mice into completely novel situations and measure the brain processes in the hippocampus. Researchers can now measure at the micro level what is happening and so get a much better grip on the neural activation in real time.